It’s that time of year, well one of the times of year I guess. It’s the end of term one when everything starts wrapping up. Different units from different classes, which means lots of different blog posts. You may remember the many posts I have already done this year about video making. There was a few we did in Alberta, the Take your Kid to Work Day one, and even our Live Event. We have been working on our video making skills and toolkit for almost three months now, thinking all the way back to the very first day of school, we even made a short video then! Crazy!! The over arching inquiry question for this unit is “What makes an awesome video?” And this post will answer that with my reflection on the unit as a whole. What I have learned from each video and why that is important. Soooooooo, Let’s get right into it!

PASSION VIDEO

I actually don’t think you guys have seen this video before since I have not written a blog post about it and I am sure glad I didn’t! This was literally my first video assignment of the year and it shows. But that’s not the point. The point is, that for this video we were given ten minutes and ten minutes only which may be another reason why it is the way it is. I was rushing and rushing, thinking for ideas without planning at all! I had no idea what to do so I did some random close ups of my face and, well, that was interesting. I think the biggest lesson I learned from this assignment was the fact that you need to take your time and stay calm, use the time you have wisely. Although I only had ten minutes, I could have done some planning to make that short period of time more efficient.

TELL A STORY

For me, the tell a story video was pretty much a second draft of my passion video. I was still talking about the same topic, animals, but instead of telling it like “I am passionate about this..”, “I am passionate about that…”, just a bunch of statements, I told it more like a story. Telling a story in film making is extremely important. You really need to have a beginning, middle, and end so it is easier to follow and read as well, it is a lot easier to determine a climax! The most exciting point of a story.

RECREATION

This video was probably the most fun video to create in my opinion. I was in a group with Amelia, Luciano, and Aedan and we had to recreate a short horror film called “RUN”…. EXACTLY! To every last detail. Costumes, sounds, scenes, etc. This really taught me to think about things way before hand, to be organized. Start looking at the clips we would need to film, try to get the right lighting, and overall, all the components that make a good quality video. It would certainly be no fun to watch a video that went form dark to light, has inconsistent audio, and costumes that make no sense. I mean of course, there are some uncontrollable variables like the weather but there are always ways to get around that such as looking at the weather forecast  before you go out and film. Here is the original one and the one above is the one we recreated.

ALBERTA VIDEOS

These videos took planning to a whole other level. In total we made three different videos through out our field study to Alberta and they were super fun to make. The one very difficult thing about making videos on the go is you only have one chance to film meaning you have to plan out your video like there’s no tomorrow. Storyspines and Storyboards! Very important! After doing this planning for a week straight I learned that is you don’t do it, it’s very difficult to age a video. Here are some examples of a few I made for my videos that really helped me plan out and execute what we needed to film as you can see in our videos above.

LIVE EVENT

Now, our live event video was very similar to the Alberta videos in the way that we only had one chance to film so I got to use my new planning skills while filming my video. But instead a of using storyboards and storyspines, I tried something new. Something called an action plan which is sort of like a checklist.

TAKE YOUR KID TO WORK DAY VIDEO

This video was extremely important to my life as a film maker. I learned how to take a proper video and distribute it into my video while editing. I learned that a good interview is planned out before, you write a list of them so you are prepared within tons. And here is a tip, always write a few extra just in case. Always film in front of a nice background. Filming in front of some random background can confuse people and really change your video for the worse. But the most important thing is that you HAVE TO USE A MIC. It makes the audio sound 10x better and much more professional. The take your kid to work day video really changed the way I film my videos and is very important to me.

CHEM STORIES VIDEO

The last video is on the complete opposite scale of things than the other ones. All of the others involved live filming like with a camera. But this one was an animation. We used an app called Keynote to do the animations and it was actually pretty simple to use but it took a while. You had to add individual little animations to each drawing you do yourself and still make it look semi-professional. It’s a lot of work but definitely worth it in the end. Gabby was a great partner for this project and I learned so much about animation.

Let’s take a look at the driving question again. What makes an awesome video? Well, it’s actually all of those things! Each of those lessons I learned from each project is very important to the success of your own. Planning, taking your time and staying calm, making it interesting by telling a story, details, etc. They all make up an awesome video. Apps like iMovie and Keynote are great for editing , that is what I used for every single one of my videos) but it’s you that has to do the filming, take the shots. Almost everybody watches movies and TV shows and it’s actually super cool to see what goes into them see all the steps cameramen and directors have to take to make a great video.

~Jordyn